On Friday 26 February 2021, the Basketball Champions League announced its collaboration with one of the fastest-growing, most innovative streaming platforms, Twitch, to live-stream games from the fifth season of the competition in France.
The 2020-21 Basketball Champions League Play-Offs begin on Tuesday 2 March and will be available live and free to digital audiences in France via the Twitch channel of FIBA. This announcement follows up the new global and multi-year partnership between FIBA and Twitch announced earlier this week.
As part of the Twitch experience, BCL fans will be able to interact with the BCL game content like never before, leveraging Twitch’s unique user-generated content elements, interactive tools and features.
For the Play-Off games involving local French club SIG Strasbourg, games on the Twitch FIBA channel will be exclusive in the digital space and will feature the talents of First Team (Thomas Dufant & Erwan Abautret) while also being co-streamed by the prominent Twitch streamer Brawks who will deliver his own unique take on the games to thousands of fans. In addition, the BCL has partnered up with Sport Buff to introduce next-generation fan engagement and gamification tools to its live stream creating a comprehensive interactive experience.
“We are delighted to announce this unique collaboration with Twitch, a live-streaming service used by a large community of superfans,” said Basketball Champions League CEO Patrick Comninos. “This innovative collaboration will bring BCL fans closer, offering them new and interactive ways to engage with top-level European basketball. This cooperation will also allow us to broaden our fanbase, grow our reach and engagement especially within the younger demographics in a key market such as France.”
“Live sport on Twitch is a unique interactive experience and it’s great to be able to bring to our community in France this exciting selection of BCL games via our ongoing collaboration with FIBA,” added Damian Burns, Senior Vice-President EMEA at Twitch.
The Play-Offs will start on March 2-3, 2021, and conclude on April 6-7, 2021. Clubs will play six games each in a round-robin system (three games home, three away), with the first two teams in each group qualifying for a Final 8 tournament that will conclude the 2020-21 season and take place over the first week of May 2021.
Check out Sport Buff’s promo video below and a review of the partnership here.